RD Group Partner Story
In 2018, Dirk Robinson was faced with a challenge. Micro Focus had just acquired GWAVA, the email archiving solution his company, Robinson Distribution (RD Group), had distributed for the previous 15 years. As Micro Focus had its own channel distributor, Dirk’s firm was left without an archiving product to offer customers.
RD Group is one of South Africa’s top IT distributors. It specialises in business critical solutions, which it distributes to approximately 300 resellers. These customers expect RD Group to provide a good email archiving solution. So Dirk and his colleagues needed to find a replacement for GWAVA.
They looked for a solution that was similar, but with more capabilities, and available in two versions:
- on-premise, for financials, in banks and government
- cloud, for customers that don’t need to know where their data is stored. That is, they don’t need or want the physical copy on their premises and see it as a cost implication. GWAVA was on-premise-only and, with businesses moving increasingly to the cloud, a cloud-enabled solution was essential
In addition, RD Group wanted it to be:
- well-priced
- bolstered with functionality
- capable of covering all email platforms
- fast, effective, and lightweight when it comes to resource requirements on the support side
King III and POPI Compliance
The chosen archiving solution would also have to meet South Africa’s government guidelines and regulations affecting data retention and compliance and the handling of private data – King III and the POPI Act.
Initially, Smarsh seemed an attractive option. Dirk says: “We thought it would be a great replacement for GWAVA because of the cloud scenario. But the product was not set up for channel business. It was mainly focused around the UK/US market. It didn’t have any channel available for South Africa. We tried to make it work but unfortunately it didn’t.”
Then RD Group came across an email archiving provider that ticked all the boxes: Cryoserver.
Why Dirk’s team chose us
“Cryoserver provided a seamless solution,” Dirk says. “It’s transparent to the user: they have no idea it’s going on in the background; it’s so fast that there’s no impact on the emailing system. If there’s a recovery needed, it’s a very seamless process – just a case of clicking two or three buttons.”
Importantly, for South African businesses, it covers King III and POPI 100%.
Another consideration was price: “[A good price] is essential for South Africa because of the economy, and Cryoserver offered a reasonable price for this region.”
Also, compared with Smarsh, Cryoserver was a much better match for his channel: “simpler, easier to get up and running and easier for customers to understand.”
So, in 2018, RD Group signed up to be a Cryoserver distributor.
Two years later, we asked Dirk how he and his customers were finding our solution.
His customers’ verdict
He says: “Customers love it. There is seamless integration with Exchange and Office 365. It’s an easy process to set up and get running. It’s a straightforward solution. We don’t have any bad feedback really.”
He and his customers have found Cryoserver to be, in his words:
- lightweight and reliable
- cost-effective
- easily scalable
- about 10 times easier than any other solution to deploy
What do they like most? Dirk says it’s the search function, which is “quite extensive. It covers anything you would like to have from a search engine.”
His colleague George adds, “[Cryoserver] is a simple solution that’s got all the bells and whistles. It’s not complicated, and is actually an easy sell because it’s very transparent in what it can and can’t do.”
Compared with Mimecast (our main competitor for cloud-based solutions), Dirk says Cryoserver offers more, at a better price.
“The best support”
Over the past two years, RD Group hasn’t had many calls for Cryoserver support. On the few occasions his customers have needed assistance, he and they have been impressed with how we delivered.
Our UK Support Desk team helped a local ISP customer set up Cryoserver and extend their disk space.
“That worked out very well,” Dirk says.
Another customer who needed our assistance is a South African government department. Dirk says it was an easy process to get us involved. Considering we did everything remotely, “it was amazing to see how well it worked and how fast Cryoserver were able to solve the problem. [Our government customer] was so happy. They came back and said it was some of best support they had ever had.”